What IS Letterboxing?

Our new favorite hobby is letterboxing (which, we can do in tandem with our national park passport cancellation search). The premise is pretty simple. People all over the world leave little boxes to be found by others who use clues from various internet websites (like www.letterboxing.org or www.atlasquest.com) to locate them. You go in search of these with your own little stamp and inkpad (something you like that you can get from any craft store), a writing utensil of some sort and your own little notebook for logging where you've been.

Once you've found a box, you'll always find a note explaining what you've found, a little stamp pertaining to the box and a logbook to leave your mark in. You use the stamp and inkpad you've brought to mark your presence in the letterbox's logbook, then use THEIR stamp to mark your own notebook as proof you've been there (essentially, exchanging stamp images). You can also write little notes to say more if you'd like. (ex--"Found it! From the Sprite & the Highlander"). Once you're done, put everything back and you're all set!

Sometimes you'll find a little box or pack inside a letterbox that comes complete with its own stamp and logbook. These are called hitchhikers and they're meant to travel. When you find one, take it with you and place it in the next letterbox you find. When you get there, pretend like the hitchhiker (or HH) is another person. Both you and the HH stamp into the box’s logbook (so people will know you were both there) and stamp both your log book and the HH’s with the box’s own stamp (so everyone will know where it’s been). Alternately, you can mail them to another letterboxing friend for them to place, which really helps move a hitchhiker around! No matter what, make sure you stamp in just like you would on a normal box.

The key in all this is making sure people DON'T see you. If you attract a lot of attention to a box, vandals might bother with it for fun, and then the box is gone for the next finders (as it stands, we're told that some people think it's funny to check for these boxes just to destroy them). We actually enjoy the cloak and dagger kind of stuff...one person plays look out while the other acquires the package, sliding along walls to make sure you don't get caught, doing the dive roll as the enemy opens FIRE...well, you get the idea, here!You also want to make sure you put things back the way you found them. We’ve been to lots of boxes now and really try to do what we can to rehide the box as well as possible. Nothing is worse than finding out your box was stolen or vandalized because someone was in a rush to take off to the next box and left it out to be found by passerbys.

Next time...gatherings!